Web Services

Yahoo has used Bing.com’s search results for some time, but this is about to change in at least one country. Yahoo Japan announced today that it has signed a deal to use Google instead of Bing. Daniel Alegre, vice president of Google’s Asia Pacific and Japan operations, stated: Yahoo Japan …

The incident apparently began with the FBI monitoring certain web blogs for terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda is known to operate and spread their communication through the Internet, but the odd part about this shut down is that it was a community web service with many users. The blogging service, Blogetery, reportedly …

According to PC World, social networking site Facebook now has half a billion users. To put in perspective, only China and India have more people than Facebook has users. Statistics posted by the news site reveal that 35.4% of North Americans and 17% of Europeans log onto Facebook every month. …

To help keep up with ever-increasing traffic, Twitter is set to open up a new custom-built data center in Utah later this year. Considering 300,000 new Twitter users log on every day, the site desperately needs to expand its capacity. The data center is being built especially for Twitter’s needs. …

According to inside sources, search giant Yahoo is considering purchasing the bit.ly. Although several other companies are also rumoured to be in talks with the URL shortener, Yahoo seems to be the most serious contender. Purchasing bit.ly would help Yahoo better compete in the social media world. Some Internet marketing …

Twitter announced yesterday that World Cup Final on July 11 marked the highest period of activity in the site’s history. During the last fifteen minutes of the match, Twitter users sent out more than 2,000 Tweets per second. This number jumped to 3,051 when Spain scored its winning goal. The …

Microsoft has formed an alliance with Dell, HP, and Fujitsu to sell pre-configured Microsoft Azure-powered cloud servers. By pre-configured, they mean that the servers should be ready to go without any further configuration required. As such, they call them “appliances” rather than servers. These appliances will allow companies to take …

Google announced today that the Chinese government has renewed its license to operate as an Internet content provider, meaning that the search engine will continue to operate in China. Earlier this year, Google strongly considered leaving the country due to its strict Internet censorship, and began redirecting Chinese users to …

According to a report by Experian Hitwise, the market share of Microsoft’s Bing search engine increased by 7% in June. Meanwhile, Google saw a drop in market share of -1%. Bing’s May market share was 9.23%. With the 7% increase, its new market share for June was 9.85%. Google’s market …

According to uptime service monitor Pingdom, social networking site Twitter had a June uptime figure of 99.17%. Although this sounds high, it is actually low by industry standards, especially for a large site like Twitter with so many resources at its disposal. The 0.83% downtime figure equates to 5 hours …